Our goal for our August 2024 expedition was to start to understand coral spawning in Tela because it’s critical to any conservation effort. Please see our other August 2024 Expedition posts for more on our planning and lessons.

As we spent more nights in the water monitoring the coral for signs of spawning, we fell into patterns. Some people peered at corals while others explored the sandy spits nearby to look for any animals that might emerge in the nighttime waters, and then we switched. When a couple people gathered together in the spits, it meant they’d found something cool and everyone came over to see what it was: a giant crab creeping along the sand, one of the many hordes of sea urchins out feeding, or an elegant moon jellyfish.

By the time I arrived at one such collection of lights, a cuttlefish had already been engaged with the divers who had come across it for a minute or so. Later, one of them told me that it seemed like the cuttlefish had tried to use our lights to hunt for fish. But when that didn’t work, it just decided to check us out.

That’s how I saw the cuttlefish at first. It was hanging in the water about a foot and and a half off the sand. There were probably five of us in a half circle and it shifted its gaze from one of us to the next, taking us in, one by one. Its arms were held in a kind of Shiva pose, each bent at a different angle, which gave it a goddess-like look. It hovered there assessing us as much as we were assessing it. Time just kind of stopped.

And then, it had enough of us. It rose up another foot or so, shot out a blob of ink, and was gone. We all sat staring at the ink, which didn’t dissipate like you might expect. It remained in a form that seemed solid, though we knew it wasn’t. Finally, a biologist who we are working with tentatively lifted a finger to touch it. A part of me was surprised when his finger permeated the blob. It wasn’t solid, of course, but it was so convincing. I later read that cuttle fish ink is sometimes encased in a membrane so that it appears to a predator like the animal is still there. It was wondrous.